Staying with unbearable thoughts, and searching for a politics that’s equal to these times.
AI World Clocks
The current time as rendered by 9 different AI models. By Brian Moore.
An update on leap seconds – Tony Finch
It has been a couple of years since my previous blog post about leap seconds, though I have been tweeting on the topic fairly frequently: see my page on date, time, and leap seconds for an index of threads. But Twitter now seems a lot less likely to stick around, so I’ll aim to collect more of my thinking-out-loud here on my blog.
Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twen…
A timely defense of liberalism that draws vital lessons…
TriLinesAt
Five minutes before bed, three lines of journaling. A social diary app on Bluesky.
Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Read the free, open access editionBuy: Amazon, Bookshop, Narrow Gauge Book Co-op, UC Press
How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself
There are Enemies, and then there are Cowards.
How to fight hate: New Humanist’s Autumn 2026 issue is out now
With race riots on the rise and the populist right gaining traction, we ask how the UK can push back
Radical Interoperability is a Political Agenda
Model the world you want to live in.
The Dark Mode Toggle Discourse
How the dark mode toggle discourse unfolded One designer's argument against the classic light/dark/system three-way switch turned into weeks of blog rebuttals, parody posts, and "do you even need a toggle at all?" takes. The timeline Aug 1…
The marketplace of rationalizations
Recent work in economics has rediscovered the importance of belief-based utility for understanding human behaviour. Belief ‘choice’ is subject to an important constraint, however: people can only bring themselves to believe things for which they can find rationalizations. When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint generates rationalization markets, social structures in which agents compete to produce rationalizations in exchange for money and social rewards. I explore the nature of such markets, I draw on political media to illustrate their characteristics and behaviour, and I highlight their implications for understanding motivated cognition and misinformation.
#760: Gambling the future into existence
Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"
Rethinking Bluesky's "Decentralization": An Assessment as of January 2026 - Nightflight
January 19, 2026
Rotating the Space: On LLMs as a Medium for Thought
An essay on LLMs as a cognitive medium
The Unsolvable Dilemma: Open Networks vs. Economic Sustainability - Nightflight
Anti-democratic attitudes are highly contagious, new psychology study finds
The rise of anti-democratic sentiments might be driven by social contagion. Researchers have discovered that citizens often adapt their personal support for authoritarian rule to align with the political views of those around them.
